Promotional items include a variety of items decorated in some manner, for example, items decorated with a logo or some other message. The function of these promotional items may include advertisement or promotion of an event, or of products or services offered by one or more vendors. The promotional items may include hats, such as baseball hats, Tee-shirts, collared type shirts including golf shirts, keychains, drinking containers such as coffee mugs and tumblers, and watches.
When applying the decorations to these items, often the criteria as to what types of materials and methods to use includes considerations related to the attractiveness and the durability of the final promotional item. For example, with respect to a decoration such as a company logo applied to a shirt, the logo would generally be applied in such a way and using materials and methods so that the logo would not fade or shrink after either wearing or washing of the shirt, and thus become unattractive or unreadable as the decorated shirt is worn and washed. In most instances, the decoration on the promotional item would be intended to have a lifespan of at least that of the lifespan of the item to which the decoration is applied.
Because the decoration applied to a promotional item is intended to last as long as the item itself, the addition of the decoration may detract from the value of the item to the user. For example, a shirt may be decorated with a logo representing a particular employer event, for example a sales conference. The decoration may include text such as “Sales Conference XXXX,” wherein the “XXXX” represents a particular year. Once the sales event is over, the user may be deterred from wearing the shirt on later occasions due to the logo, wherein the user no longer wishes to promote or be associated with the decoration as it relates to the particular event or time period. In a further instance, the shirt may indicate a particular status to be associated with the user at a particular point in time, for example “Staff” or “Traffic Control,” but wherein the status is not intended to extend beyond a particular event or time period, and therefore the party issuing the shirt may not want the user to retain the indication of the status beyond the designated time period.
Knowing the user will not continue to use the base item after a particular time period, or that the promotional item may be discarded after the particular time period relevant to the promotional item, the base item may be selected to include a low quality or low cost base item. The result may be that the promotional item has limited value to the user receiving the promotional item. In addition, the user, and others exposed to and coming in contact with the promotional item, may view the parties distributing or associated with the promotional item as “cheap” or as providing low quality products and services because of the low quality and low cost of the base item used in creating the promotional item.